Doc Mgt Roll-Up: Bright Outlook for ECM

For those losing sleep about the relative importance of the enterprise content management (ECM) space, some reassurance.

New research from MarketsandMarkets estimates that by 2020, the ECM's value will rise to $60 billion, up from $25 billion this year, representing growth of 19.5 percent every year over the next five years.

This may surprise those who focus on headline grabbers such as social media, big data, analytics and digital business. But ECM still claims its space as a core enterprise technology. And after several years of weak investment, it appears organizations are ready to start investing in new software again.

The demand comes as businesses try to solve some pain points: to streamline business operations, to cut costs, and to reduce total cost of ownership through content management.

The findings dovetail with the results of AIIM's report earlier this year which found enterprises that had previously dragged their heels to implement ECM strategies are now beginning to develop such strategies.

Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), retail, transportation and logistics, government and defense, life sciences and healthcare, energy utilities, and government organizations are set to become the major consumers of enterprise content management solutions.

Microsoft's Yammer Plans

A promise of things to come from Yammer. According to a blog post by Juliet Wei, senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team, Microsoft will be sprucing-up the Yammer interface to improve group experiences.

But the big news promised for next year is deeper integration with Office 365.

According to the post, the Yammer team is working on wrapping up the foundational identity work with Azure Active Directory, using Office Graph signals for better people and group suggestions, using Office Online for multi-user coauthoring in Yammer, and hooking into the Office 365 Groups service to enable cross-workload scenarios with OneDrive, Outlook, OneNote and Skype.

The integration also aims to improve collaboration with extended team members by delivering external groups, where users can invite outside participants into existing Yammer groups.

Since it bought Yammer in 2012, Microsoft has indicated on more than one occasion that Yammer will become the social layer of Office 365 and SharePoint. It has since introduced functionality to achieve this goal, albeit slowly.

Delivering on last week's announcement could go a long way to achieve that, particularly for teams. No release date has been announced.

DocsCorp’s Crawler Compression

With the new Compression module IT Administrators can significantly reduce large document file sizes in content repositories via an automated backend process.

A content repository in this case could be a document management system, SharePoint or a Windows file system. Reducing document file size reduces storage costs and speeds up file transfers when downloading or sending documents via email.

ContentCrawler analyzes documents based on search queries and compression or OCR thresholds specified by the IT Administrator. It then processes the documents that meet the set criteria and replaces the originals in the content repository with smaller, fully text-searchable files.

Given the cost and difficulty associated with storing and managing large files, this solution could be a boon for repository managers. contentCrawler integrates with a document management systems including iManage, HP TRIM, OpenText eDOCS, OpenText Content Server and more.

Easier Dropbox Document Sharing

Finally, Dropbox announced users can drag and drop URLs into Dropbox — via the web or desktop — and open them on any device.

Bookmarks can now be moved anywhere, instead of confined to a specific browser on a certain computer. But it also promises you can organize information, no matter the format, into Dropbox folders — putting information into one central place.

With all documents and content in a shared team folder, everyone gets easy access to all the files they need, on all devices, from one Dropbox folder. Sign into Dropbox.com or download the latest version of the Dropbox iOS or Android app to try the new capabilities out.

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